1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus that stores and manages data files, a control method for the information processing apparatus, and a computer-readable storage medium storing a control program for implementing the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a volume of data such as image data and video data handled by information processing apparatuses have been increasing, nonvolatile storage media such as a hard disk and a memory card are increasingly used as storage devices that temporarily store data during processing.
When data is stored in a nonvolatile storage medium, the data is recorded as a file managed by a file system (hereinafter referred to as a “data file”). Thus, when the data becomes unnecessary, the data file must be deleted by the file system.
The data file usually has file management information including data composition information such as index information in a data portion (for example, a data block list in a case where the data portion is managed on a block-to-block basis) and actual data, and is operated from an OS (operating system) by the file system.
As compared with a process in which only management information of a file is deleted when the file is deleted, a process in which actual data (data portion indicated by data composition information of a file to be deleted) as well is deleted is referred to as complete deletion. In complete deletion, data of an actual data portion is usually deleted by overwriting the actual data portion with overwrite data (predetermined values such as random numbers and “0”) a plurality of times.
When complete deletion is carried out on the entire file in response to a request for deletion of large-amount data such as an image file, a heavy load is imposed on the process, and hence it takes a lot of time for the next process to become executable, which means that the response of the apparatus is slow.
Further, when power is turned off while a file is being deleted after complete deletion is started, there may be a case where a deletion process is interrupted, and after that, when the apparatus is started, the complete deletion is not continued. Thus, reliability for complete deletion is low.